Toyota Offered Incentives for Kentucky Plant Expansion

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s
biggest automaker, is being offered $146.5 million in tax
incentives by Kentucky to expand a plant in the state that’s
already the company’s largest in North America.

The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority
approved the package yesterday, based on Toyota enlarging its
auto-assembly factory in Georgetown by 2015 to produce an
additional model. The Toyota City, Japan-based company would
have to invest $531.2 million and add 570 full-time jobs to
receive the full value of the credits, the agency said in an e-mailed statement.

“Securing this significant investment in Georgetown,
Kentucky would be a huge economic development victory,” Mandy
Lambert, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky agency, said in a
separate e-mail.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda and other senior executives
including Jim Lentz, the carmaker’s chief executive officer for
the North American region, will make a production announcement
on April 19 in New York, the company said in a statement. Toyota
will produce Lexus models at the plant, Kyodo reported, citing
no one. The company is moving production of some Lexus ES cars
to the U.S., the Wall Street Journal said, citing a person
familiar with the matter it didn’t identify.

Toyota’s American depositary receipts fell 1 percent to
$110.55 at the close in New York. The depositary receipts gained
19 percent this year compared with an 8.1 percent increase for
the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Mike Goss, a spokesman for Toyota’s North American
manufacturing unit, said before the company issued the statement
that it hasn’t yet decided to expand the factory. Toyota has
been informed of the incentive package, he said, without
elaborating.

New Car

Toyota is considering increasing the Georgetown capacity by
50,000 units annually starting in 2015, according to the
Kentucky statement, which didn’t specify the new model.

The Georgetown plant, opened in 1988, is the main
production site of Camry sedans, the best-selling U.S. car for
the past 11 years. Toyota has invested $6 billion at the site.
The factory employs about 6,600 people and can build more than
500,000 vehicles and 600,000 engines annually, according to the
company’s website. The new project could add 750 jobs when
contract workers are included, according to the Kentucky
statement.

Georgetown is “competing with other Toyota plants for the
opportunity to build this new model in North America,” the
agency said in the statement.

The state incentives were reported earlier by the
Louisville Courier-Journal.